Alert !!! - SANITY is breaking out among the Freepers...

(this comes out of a thread discussing the "creative" plan to block President Obama's victory by boycotting the Electoral College vote, spun over at WND)

...snip...

It does nobody any good to live in a fantasy world. Maybe television has destroyed our country, people are way to easily deceived into believing fiction.

You could add up every imagined fraud thrown out by the WND nuts, the conspiracists, and people who are just too eager to find wrongdoing to actually read headers on spreadsheets, and you wouldn’t come close to the vote totals separating Romney from Obama and victory.

When did supposedly intelligent conservatives start thinking that polls of 1000 people tell you the truth? Not that it matters, because the polls told us that Romney would lose — except of course if you changed the parameters more to your liking. State polls, the only polls that matter in an electoral college election, showed even BEFORE the hurricane that Romney needed a miracle.

...snip...

So long as you view the world from your own perspective, you won’t understand why anybody would vote for Obama, and therefore you will be shocked, and assume it must be fraud. Hang out for a day with the “other side”, and you’ll understand why they loved Obama, why they got better turnout than you could expect, and how they won the election.

2. To the freeps

The voting machines are owned by republicans. There is no way we stole many votes. Obama knew he didn't need to, all he had to do was make sure the people showed up to vote. Every election that the Democrats turnout at around 60% we win.

You should join us in now seeing to it that the business of the country is done by the will of the people.

8. ignorant of math however

re: "When did supposedly intelligent conservatives start thinking that polls of 1000 people tell you the truth?"

the mathematics behind confidence intervals and probability is as solid as anything else in math. If the sample is unbiased, a sample size of 1000 is sufficient to produce a margin of error of around 3% with 95% confidence. This is the typical number used for election polls. It doesn't matter how large the population is. It will be just as accurate with a population of 200,000,000 as it is with a population of 200,000. The trick is in sampling - bias can crop in many different ways.

9. Thank you!

10. Doesn't this depend on the variance?

I've always assumed that, for political polling, the practical effect of considering variance is that there's a higher margin of error in the rare poll in which more than two candidates receive significant support, because the variance is higher.

Of course, you're absolutely right that the issue of sampling bias is far more important, as the Literary Digest discovered.

11. He's a TROLL!!!

14. A small minority

So long as you view the world from your own perspective, you won’t understand why anybody would vote for Obama, and therefore you will be shocked, and assume it must be fraud. Hang out for a day with the “other side”, and you’ll understand why they loved Obama, why they got better turnout than you could expect, and how they won the election.